Author: Tursunova Balkadisha
Editor: Kigbaeva Kamila
An artist named Carlotta suffers from a rare disease - she cannot recognize other people's faces and her own. At the same time, she revealed in herself a talent for painting portraits of faces that she could not even imagine. In order to draw her self-portrait, she needs to stay in a poorly lit room, with one hand outlining her face contours, while with the other, in the meantime, apply the drawing on paper without using a mirror. Thus, Carlotta painted thousands of self-portraits, the meaning and meaning of which bears an otherworldly character: in some paintings she has several heads, eyes, they can be turned upside down, in others they overlap.
This state of the artist was noticed only when the girl went to school - she could not remember the faces of even those close to her. Arriving at the store with her mother, she could go back after a completely different person. At school, for her, all faces seemed the same, she could not concentrate in a team and remember the face of her teacher. This peculiarity of Carlotta caused the teachers to think badly of her - they considered her stupid and absent-minded. The girl could not return to class and tune in to study.
At the same time, in fact, she was very fond of reading and dreaming, secluded with her library somewhere in a dark cave. After leaving school, Carlotta, at the age of twenty, completely abandoned society, taking her books, she went on a boat along the Australian coast. And only at the age of 40, Carlotta found out about her condition in a medical journal. The impossibility of recognizing faces, called prosopagnosia, has become the cause of many years of suffering for women and pressure from society. If this genetic disease had been diagnosed at school, perhaps she would not have had problems with the perception of the world, and the teachers would have treated her differently.
Having learned about such a rare and at the same time unique talent to paint self-portraits, having prosopagnosia, the neurobiologist Valentin Ridl suggested that Carlotta make a documentary about her. This condition has sparked a deep interest in science to explore all the properties of information processing in people with this disease. Indeed, in such a state, fantasy has no boundaries: a person sees an object, reaches for it, but it disappears, it stretches again, and this process cannot be stopped ...
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53192821?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/health&link_location=live-reporting-story
